Month: August 2005

Paul Graham on the deeper business lessons of open source

Doc Searls points to an excellent essay by Paul Graham on What Business Can Learn from Open Source. It’s full of thought-provoking observations. Here’s just one sample:

The third big lesson we can learn from open source and
blogging is that ideas can bubble up from the bottom, instead of
flowing down from the top. Open source and blogging both work
bottom-up: people make what they want, and the the best stuff
prevails.

Does this sound familiar? It’s the principle of a market economy.
Ironically, though open source and blogs are done for free, those
worlds resemble market economies, while most companies, for all
their talk about the value of free markets, are run internally like
commmunist states.

There are two forces that together steer design: ideas about
what to do next, and the enforcement of quality. In the channel
era, both flowed down from the top. For example, newspaper editors
assigned stories to reporters, then edited what they wrote.

Open source and blogging show us things don’t have to work that
way. Ideas and even the enforcement of quality can flow bottom-up.
And in both cases the results are not merely acceptable, but better.
For example, open source software is more reliable precisely because
it’s open source; anyone can find mistakes.[ Paul Graham]

Well worth your time. I suspect that most large
organizations will have an extraordinarily hard time grasping and
acting on the trends Graham highlights. Those that do manage will have
an edge in attracting talent.

Learning from your mistakes

Some good advice about the important role of mistakes and what to do
with them. My goal has always been to make “interesting mistakes.”

New essay: how to learn from your mistakes.
If you're doing something interesting, mistakes are inevitable. How you
learn from your mistakes defines what kinds of mistakes you'll make the
next time: the same ones? new ones? mistakes that get you closer to
success or move you away from it?

How to learn from your mistakes.

[Berkun blog]

Frankston on DRM, markets, and why intelligent design isn't

Bob Frankston has had several recent posts illuminating the long-term
strategic blindness of competitors pursuing doomed approaches to
Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). The short and sweet version:

DRM vs the Bathroom.
For those who found my recent DRM post too complicated I’ll put it more
simply. There are those who believe that I must not zap commercials
while watching their content. It's not very different from saying I’m
not allowed to go to the bathroom during commercials — I must use a
DRM compliant toilet in order to implement such policies.

If they can require that all my wires and devices be DRM complaint why
not the other distractions that reduce the value of their content? [SATN]

In a much longer post,
well worth your attention, Frankston draws some very provocative
connections between DRM approaches to competition and the fundamental
emptiness of intelligent design as a way to not think about how
evolutionary processes truly work. Several key grafs:

Too bad evolution is taught in biology class because it makes it hard to see the larger issues. Dynamic systems are evolutionary systems and if you
try to limit their dynamics they fail. If you believe in intelligent
design you can assume that systems can be guided. Marketplaces are just
complex systems. If you give the incumbents the role of the intelligent
designer the systems will fail because you don’t allow for new ideas.
….

This is why I keep emphasizing that teaching evolution in biology classes
leaves us without understanding that evolution is a characteristic of
all systems not just “special” ones. Without such understanding it is
difficult to see how and why the Internet works. Even more to the point
why it works despite and not because of governance. Why complexity is
an emergent property of the lack of understanding. We don’t “solve”
complexity by layering on top of it. When we design systems we have to
go underneath the system expose the simplicity.

It’s not at all fair to accuse those who thwart marketplace processes as being “anti-evolutionists”. Even though I think it is obvious the onus is
still on me to demonstrate that the mechanisms are the same. I still
claim that there is a basic philosophical alignment akin to the one
that George Lakoff posits in Moral Politics.
It is hard to trust the marketplace because at any point in time it’s too easy to see the “right” answer. It’s even more difficult to see the
importance of these dynamic processes when cling to the present for
safety.[SATN]

Hierarchical organizations are typically not very comfortable
with real market dynamics. Most strategy work is about finding ways to
avoid or interfere with the smooth workings of competitive markets
without going to jail. At root, what Frankston is arguing is that in
the long run, markets will always win.

Bill Gates interview in the Chronicle of Higher Education

Some interesting tidbits from Gates about computing in the educational arena. The Chronicle of Higher Education has nicely placed the interview outside of their usual paywall.

The Chronicle Interviews Bill Gates. Bill Gates offered some predictions of the future and a defense of Microsoft’s security practices, in an exclusive interview with The Chronicle’s Andrea L. Foster. (The Chronicle, free link)… [The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog]

It’s a bottoms-up world

Rex is right. Go read what Kevin Kelly said.

Then think about how the same logic applies inside organizations. Organizations that continue to try to apply top-down control will increasingly fall behind those organizations that can figure out how to tap the same kind of bottoms-up logic that has driven the web over the last decade. How fast that will play out is hard to say, but the evidence from the web is that it will happen much faster than we expect or will be comfortable with.

What Kevin Kelly said. What Kevin Kelly said: (Note: I’m still not blogging this weekend, I just happened to finally getting around to reading something in a magazine that, fortunately, is also online, and couldn’t help myself.) In a must-read Wired Magazine article, “We Are the Web,” Kevin Kelly displays how to make a profound argument stick, not by focusing on the rules and rants about who can and cannot blog, but by providing insight into the beauty of what has taken place over the past ten years — and, in turn, making us realize that the next ten could take us places the rule-makers (be they bloggers or old-media types) are the last to envision.:

What we all failed to see was how much of this new world would be manufactured by users, not corporate interests. Amazon.com customers rushed with surprising speed and intelligence to write the reviews that made the site’s long-tail selection usable. Owners of Adobe, Apple, and most major software products offer help and advice on the developer’s forum Web pages, serving as high-quality customer support for new buyers. And in the greatest leverage of the common user, Google turns traffic and link patterns generated by 2 billion searches a month into the organizing intelligence for a new economy. This bottom-up takeover was not in anyone’s 10-year vision.

No Web phenomenon is more confounding than blogging. Everything media experts knew about audiences – and they knew a lot – confirmed the focus group belief that audiences would never get off their butts and start making their own entertainment. Everyone knew writing and reading were dead; music was too much trouble to make when you could sit back and listen; video production was simply out of reach of amateurs. Blogs and other participant media would never happen, or if they happened they would not draw an audience, or if they drew an audience they would not matter. What a shock, then, to witness the near-instantaneous rise of 50 million blogs, with a new one appearing every two seconds. There – another new blog! One more person doing what AOL and ABC – and almost everyone else – expected only AOL and ABC to be doing. These user-created channels make no sense economically. Where are the time, energy, and resources coming from?

[rexblog: Rex Hammock’s Weblog]